I discovered a new Catholic poet yesterday and added a selection of his work to the YIM Catholic Bookshelf. His name is Aubrey Thomas de Vere. I don’t recall how I discovered him actually, because it really wasn’t my doing, I just found him in the Treasure Chest, so to speak. I remember seeing that he had dedicated a book of poems to Cardinal John Henry Newman, though,  so I sat up and took notice.

He is an Irish poet of some renown, having lived in the 19th Century, dying early in the Twentieth in 1902. According to the citation in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “a critic in the Quarterly Review of 1896 says of his poetry, that next to Browning’s it shows the fullest vitality, resumes the largest sphere of ideas, covers the broadest intellectual field since the poetry of Wordsworth.”

That is pretty heavy duty talent to be compared to. I think upon further examination of his gift, you will find it an accurate statement.  De Vere himself has the following words to say about his poems on sacred subjects,

Poetry, like every other authentic Art, finds, of course, her proper place among the Handmaidens of Religion. Her service, however, is twofold — direct and indirect: and when, without venturing to claim the title of sacred poetry, she yet treats directly on “sacred subjects,” she may too often be charged with intruding into a region more elevated than her own.

To Poetry commonly belongs rather the refracted and coloured beam than the white light ; and the humblest is often the highest offeringwhich she can lay on the Altar. In illustrating that divine beauty which still hangs in broken gleams around a fallen world;—in tracing a love more than human which lives within the human affections;—in cherishing justice and truth as the foundations unremoved amid the fleeting pageantry of outward things;—and in thus inculcating fidelity to the righteous cause, especially when obscured or trampled down;—in doing these things, Poetry discharges a moral function, auxiliary to a higher teaching than her own: and thus much, ‘without departing from her subordinate sphere, she cannot but do in proportion as her inspiration is pure, and her purpose sincere.

In extenuation, then, of attempts which may be condemned as rash, I have only to observe that the sacred subjects touched on in the latter portion of this volume, belong, for the most part, rather to the border land of Religious Philosophy and Art, than to Religion, properly so called.

Which means his work is art alone and not the orthodox poetry of, say, St. Ephrem. Here is an example of one of De Vere’s poems on the sacred.

Law And Grace

It is not true, that unto us, enrolled
Within Christ’s band, the Law exists no longer:
But this is true; that we, who sank of old,
Oppressed beneath that armour’s weight of gold,
Sustain it now in glory, being stronger!

The Form remains: but is a form no more
To eyes inspired, that see
Through bondage Liberty;
And, in His earthly shape, their God adore.
To Love, all things are Love:
To Grace, all things are Grace:
And humble Faith can never move
In an unholy place!

Within, but not beneath, the Law we dwell.
That wall, of old our prison’s circuit, now
(Girding the citied mountain’s sovereign brow)
Is but the bulwark of man’s citadel.
Large views beyond are given:
Safe views of all the earth ;
and healing airs of Heaven.

Within the Temple of the Law we stand ;
As once without it stood
That awe-struck multitude ;
And on the marble Tables lay our hand.
There, like the Priest of old, our God we meet :
And stand up boldly by the Mercy-Seat.

De Vere also wrote a sonnet with the same title as well,

Law And Grace

Yes, I remember: once beneath a yoke
We walked, with jealous pride and painful fear:
Then a stern footstep sounded ever near;
And, when that Presence dread His silence broke,
Austere and cold as if a statue spoke,
Each marble sentence smote upon my ear;
Yet ” Thou shalt not” was all that I could hear—
So swiftly from its trance my spirit woke.
The sun was rising. Floods of light divine,
Golden, and crimson on the mountains played.
I saw the village spire like silver shine:
Eolian music filled the echoing shade:
And I could hear, through all the murmuring glen,
Music of moving Gods come down to live with men.

Which did you prefer? Version A or version B? You can read more of Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s poems here.

Whenever I take our younger son to the barber shop, I’m reminded of time’s passage and the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90: “Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.”  Something about this barber shop, which I have been taking our sons to for a decade now, makes me reflect on the unfolding of time. I took Lucky for a haircut last weekend. What a privilege it is to watch our children grow up.


I first started going to this barber shop, then called Santo’s Barber Shop after a long-deceased owner, in our small town’s central shopping district when our older son was three. Now 13, he shuns the place, connecting it with the crewcuts of his early years.  Instead,  he has me take him to a stylist in a unisex salon who can work with his kinky hair.

But Lucky, who is ten and a half, doesn’t mind the $12 haircuts. The first time I took Lucky to the barber shop, he was three, and his bright blond ringlets reached to his shoulders. The barber propped a wooden board between the arms of the metal chair so our son could sit at a good working height, where the barber could easily reach him. The vinyl cape covered his body. I stood behind the barber, anxious for my son to keep still so as not to be cut by the razors or scissors. He sat as still as a statue as his blond ringlets fell to the tiled floor. These days, I don’t hover behind the barber. I read a magazine, eavesdrop on conversations, or knit.

Our visits to what is now called “Everybody’s Barber Shop” are infrequent; Lucky gets a couple of crew cuts a year. He lets his hair grow out until it covers his ears (as in his picture here). Last weekend, for the first time, he told me he wanted just a trim, and not a crewcut. So that is what he got. He reached another milestone in this visit. For years, Angela, a longtime employee and now the owner, handed him a lollipop as he left. “You’re too old for lollipops now,” she told him last Saturday in her rich Hungarian accent. Lucky nodded, as if he had understood all along that this moment would materialize.

My favorite former newspaper boss, Chuck Paolino (who happens to be a Catholic deacon), has blogged about the beauty of barber shops. “Places like that barber shop have always interested me because of the role they play in a community that transcends the immediate purpose of their existence,” he writes.

Time passes. Little boys outgrow crewcuts and lollipops and grow into young men. God’s hand is everywhere in this unfolding. When St. Paul was imprisoned in Rome, he wrote a letter to the church in Ephesus, where he had ministered for years: “Watch carefully then how you live, not as foolish persons but as wise, making the most of the opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord. “

May these words serve as a guide on how to count our days.

The beautiful thing about Catholic life, if you love it, is that everything streams into it: literature, music, theater and art, politics, science. Everything can remind one of the beauty of creation. Everything can be a sign of Christ’s presence. Even music you know nothing about.

I have written before about the joys of Pandora Radio, a Web service that allows you to build your own customized stations. Like a song? Make it the “seed” of a new station and Pandora will grow you a whole wildflower garden of music with similar qualities.

Thanks to my pal James, I’ve been listening to Stile Antico Radio, which features polyphony, mostly from the Renaissance. But Pandora is sneaky. It will start slipping you stuff that’s from an entirely different era or even planet just because this music has features of that music. Thus I met Arvo Pärt (pictured).

Believe me, I know nothing about the guy except what I read in Wikipedia. But I love the umlaut. And I love the music. So, presto, I asked Pandora to create another station for me, and for the past week, while out walking, I’ve been listening to Arvo Pärt Radio on my iPhone, complete with cool white ear buds.

Here are some selections from Arvo Pärt Radio (how do you pronounce that name?!), with minimal liner notes from the honestly ignorant Mr. Bull.

Arvo Pärt, “Agnus Dei”
Born Estonia 1935. Apparently still living, or was living the last time his Wiki entry was updated. Made up his own style of composition called tintinnabuli but “also finds inspiration from Gregorian chant.” Those in the know say he belongs to the school of “holy minimalism.” I say I like his stuff.

Eric Whitacre, “Water Night”
Now this guy is young, born 1970, yikes, 19 years younger than me. He shouldn’t even be allowed on this site. But get a load of his music. It’s beautiful.

Sir John Tavener, “The Lamb”
Born in England in 1944, he claims to be a direct descendant of 16th-century composer John Taverner, but I say, if so, what happened to the second r? Strikes me as a bit of a poseur, but then I hear this setting of William Blake’s “The Lamb,” and I no longer care.

If you read music, you’ll especially enjoy this piece by Sir John, “Funeral Ikos.”

Henryk Gorecki, “Totus Tuus”
Again, it was James who tipped me off to Gorecki, and I’ll close with this piece. Born in Southwest Poland in 1933, he wrote it in 1987 in honor of Pope John Paul II and one of his return trips to Poland. “Totus Tuus” was JPII’s apostolic motto, “All Yours,” an expression of his devotion to Mary. Do you have any favorite pieces by any of these modern masters?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3qOBQ1ZkQM

My sojourn in the wilderness lasted forty years, from 1967, when I left the Episcopal Church, until 2007, when I wandered into a Catholic one. Many things tried to pull me apart during those years, and many meanwhile sustained me. One of the latter was the poetry of Walt Whitman, which I used to memorize and recite while out walking, striding along much as he did 150 years ago.

I know, I know. Walt Whitman was both an egotist and a pantheist. Whitman was no Catholic. He was homosexual, too—although if we throw out every poet who shared that characteristic, we lose Auden’s “Ballad of Barnaby” and Dunstan Thompson’s “Magdalen” and (who can say?) maybe even Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” It’s a sure thing that with Whitman you have to pick and choose, but then the Great American Poet gives you the whole universe to choose from. What follows are a few of my favorite pickings and choosings.

You can dip into Leaves of Grass almost anywhere and find lines to inspire your faith. Here, for example, from “Starting from Paumanok”:

Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough, 
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion, 
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur; 
(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion, 
Nor land nor man or women without religion.)

Whitman envisions America as a great Christian nation. Pantheist, Christian, proto-Buddhist, whatever you call him, Whitman lived in awe of the Creation and his poems inspire awe. Even “Song of Myself,” which is far from my favorite, has lines like these to ponder:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

Awe at creation and skepticism at science are encapsulated in one of Whitman’s great short poems, just eight lines long and all one sentence:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. 

When I was in fifth grade my family moved from Minnesota to Connecticut, and I was plunked down mid-year in a new school, where I was a fish out of water. My saving grace was being a pretty good athlete—and winning the public speaking contest with Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”—Whitman’s ode to Lincoln after the assassination. But that’s not a particularly religious poem, so if you’re interested, I’ll let you look it up here.

Instead, I’ll close with my favorite lines from Whitman, the final lines from “Song of the Open Road.” The beauty of Catholicism, for me, is in the companionship it offers—of friends in my parish, of that great big fraternity known as the communion of saints, and finally of Jesus Christ. Together, we walk the road of salvation, leaving everything behind. That’s what Whitman describes at the end of his great poem. Perhaps you can imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying the following words to the Twelve. I hope I would have followed Him too:

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? 
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?